World Series Gigapans Take Hi-Res View of the Action

Nose pickers attending the World Series beware. MLB has contracted photographers to shoot hugely hi-res Gigapan photos of every MLB post-season game this year, and you could be caught in the act.

The stitched together and zoomable photos have become a popular phenomenon in the photo world, allowing people to find themselves in the crowd and tag themselves with Facebook. Sports photographer veteran Bruce Ely handled the gigapans for the playoff games in the Bay Area and says they were a way to experiment with the evolution of photography.

“I’ve always liked incorporating technology into photography and lately this is the one I’ve been into,” he says.

To make the photos, Ely says he first tries to find a spot that both covers a good swath of the stadium and is compositionally interesting. Many of the gigapans that MLB has used from various photographers, including Ely, are shot from the back of the stadium or from the scoreboard, which allows the photographer to capture as much of the stadium as possible.

But Ely’s favorite gigapans so far are the ones he’s shot from the upper corner of the Giant’s AT&T Park above right field. Instead of just the stadium, the photo captures part of the Bay Bridge as well as the famous kayakers and boaters out in the bay.

“It was definitely a better picture because the angle was more engaging,” he says.

To make the picture itself, Ely uses an automated rotating tripod head manufactured by the GigaPan company. The shooter tells it what camera and lens he’ll be using and where the top left and bottom right corners are so it knows how many pictures it needs to cover the area with the correct amount of overlap so they can all be stitched together. In Ely’s case he says he’s been shooting with a Canon 5D Mark III and a 300mm 2.8.

The GigaPan technology can do the metering and focusing as it rotates and takes the pictures but Ely likes to control it manually. He also likes to control the exposure because there’s a lot of variable light at the stadiums and he has a better chance than the machine of making sure the exposures are similar enough to fit together.

“As a professional it’s easier for me to ensure that it’s right by manually doing it instead of letting a piece of hardware do it,” he says.

One problem Ely and anyone else shooting a gigapan face is the amount of time it takes to make all those photos. Normally he says his gigapans at the baseball games consist of between 250 and 500 photos and take 20 to 30 minutes to complete.

During that time a lot is going on in the stadium and on the field so there are always some glitches. Fans closer to where Ely’s camera sits are sometimes sliced in awkward ways if they’ve moved between the various passes of the camera.

And down on the field Ely has to pay particularly close attention to things like making sure teams don’t switch from offense to defense during the middle of the process.

Once the photos are shot, Ely uses Aperture to make any small toning tweaks for the exposure, and then loads everything into the software program called Autopano Giga, which does the stitching. In the end, the images are somewhere around 10 GB in size.

That’s a big file and Ely says he usually has to leave the game pretty early to make sure he can get it all put together and uploaded in time. For Game 7 of the National League Championship Series between the Giants and the Cardinals he says he watched from the hotel room as Giants players rushed the mound in celebration.

“It’s a totally different approach,” he says. “But I did get back at those guys who stayed by saying I probably got more pictures published than any of them.”

Here’s The Thing With Ad Blockers

We get it: Ads aren’t what you’re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on. So, add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. We’d really appreciate it.